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Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘British families, not recent arrivals': Farage's strategy to win the next election
Shortly before the 2024 election, two of my opinion research team returned shocked from a trip to Portsmouth, where they had been speaking to working-class swing voters. Local people were planning to vote Labour and the Tories were dismissed out of hand. So far, so predictable. But the researchers heard something new and surprising: people were explicitly saying this was their last throw of the dice for mainstream politics. If Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street off the back of big promises to change the country for the better – and then failed to deliver – they vowed they would defect to Nigel Farage. Back then, there was a giant mismatch between focus groups and national polling. While every poll suggested Labour had irresistible momentum, talking to people in detail revealed the opposite: that there was no enthusiasm at all for Starmer or his team. Any enthusiasm seemed to be with Reform. Yet Reform too had a problem at the ballot box in 2024, which was that voters just wanted the Conservatives out. Putting a cross next to Reform risked complicating matters, while choosing Labour would do the job, so Reform won fewer seats that they otherwise might have. Given that Labour were set to inherit the same problems that the Conservatives had struggled with, Reform's true victory seemed likely to emerge after the election. And so it has turned out. Polls move all the time, but Reform are now polling in the high 20 per cent mark, with Labour polling in the low 20s and the Tories a little lower. This combination of perceived Labour failings on issues like immigration, growth and the NHS, and continued Reform popularity, has propelled Farage for the first time into position as the country's potential next prime minister. It is unfamiliar territory. Successfully evolving from a party of protest to a credible party of power will be a titanic job. And while the prize is enormous, the risks involved in building and sustaining a broad and often contradictory electoral coalition are also huge. It was a conundrum that Farage appeared to address this week, when he made what was essentially his first speech as a possible future prime minister. Ostensibly, Farage was announcing a mini-policy package. But what the speech most clearly revealed was the high-wire act Farage must now embark upon as he appeals to a broader public rather than a minority – even a significant minority – of voters. As a political strategist who has pored over electoral data for 25 years, I've seen how Farage's primary following has been made up of 'upwardly-mobile', lower-middle-class, ex-Tories who revere Margaret Thatcher. But for the last few years, they have been joined by a mass of poorer, working-class voters who have expectations of state support that simply are not shared by Farage's first followers. So while most of his prospective voters are provincial and on lower incomes, they increasingly pull in different directions. This week showed Reform will struggle to please both sides. In truth, the policy package Farage announced was a dog's breakfast. It will confirm to many in Westminster that they are miles away from being ready for government. Breezily reassuring everyone that cutting waste will pay all the bills is already attracting ridicule. For the scale of the proposals was vast. On the one hand, Farage pledged to protect winter fuel payments for older voters and to scrap the two-child benefit cap. On the other hand, they pledged to raise the personal allowance for income tax. Concerns raised about Reform's credibility on the public finances will not have seriously registered among the party's supporters – and most will be enthused at the prospect of Reform channelling Elon Musk and taking a chainsaw to public spending. And on the substance, none of these policies will have alienated any part of their coalition. However, their more affluent, Thatcherite voters will have raised an eyebrow at least at their pledge to remove the two-child benefit cap. A year ago, polls showed voters backed the cap by two-to-one as people tired of seeing neighbours using welfare to sustain lifestyles that full-time workers are struggling to match. Farage says removing this cap will boost the domestic workforce and reduce firms' reliance on migrant labour. The policy, he said, 'is aimed at British families. It's not aimed at those that come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children.' This will be enough to reassure Reform's coalition that he was not in the process of selling out. He will not mind that such policies will inevitably bring accusations of a 'Britain-first' nativism, reflecting his closeness to President Trump's Maga movement in America. Farage knows exactly how to walk that fine line between hard-edged rhetoric and offensive speech; he will be able to justify his comments as reflecting public concern about migrant workers. Reform wants to replace the Tories initially, and they are on track to do so. Instinctively, they know their approach speaks to the mass of lower-income white voters. It would be absurd to suggest that Reform is trying anything more electorally sophisticated than that. However, Farage knows more about Trump's campaigning than even most American politicians. He will be aware that Trump's second campaign managed to attract many ethnic minority voters whose parents and grandparents moved to the US. Trump did so by appealing to these communities' American patriotism and their belief that citizenship and prosperity is hard-earned and hard-won. Just as these communities were hostile to illegal and 'non-conventional' immigration, because it provided short-cuts their families never enjoyed, so Farage might, in time, find that his rhetoric on work, welfare and citizenship plays well with some minority groups too. After all, many ethnic minority voters have chosen the Tories in recent elections, for similar reasons – above all, the party's (previous) emphasis on lower taxes for workers. In any case, Farage will also be able to point to Labour's recent form here. Last week, The Telegraph reported on a memo sent by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, in which she suggested restricting benefits to recent migrants. Above all, what unites the two sides of Reform's coalition is anger with the status quo. Farage came of age, politically, 20 years ago, just when working-class anger was building. He knows better than anyone how to tap into it. I got my first taste of this anger in 2004, working on the successful 'North East Says No' campaign against a regional assembly. Our brutal anti-politician message ran like a hot knife through butter. 'Politicians talk, we pay' was our slogan. We were no geniuses; we merely tapped into extreme discontent that was building. Farage's Ukip played a supporting role in this victory. The mainstream parties have never understood Farage because they have never understood the scale of working-class rage. Because the main parties kept winning general elections, they told themselves that the increasingly-common voter revolts were never serious. But these mainstream politicians were not listening to what voters were really saying across England. I ran an in-depth study of the most disaffected voters in the late 2000s – people who said they were openly tempted to junk the main parties or not vote at all. I remember listening to completely furious voters in Stoke, convinced that the country was run by an elite that neither listened to nor cared about them. Moderate political leaders at the time never knew it, but they were effectively running a country made of revolutionary voters who had simply calculated that the mainstream parties offered the best opportunity for actual change in the short-term – above all, from 2010, on immigration. This is something Farage always understood, and which Labour is now slowly realising (hence Rayner's suggestion to restrict migrant benefits). Immigration has never been the only driver of working-class discontent. In 2024, the state of the NHS and the legacy of the cost-of-living crisis loomed large. But opposition to large-scale immigration has always been the issue where political failure and hypocrisy have been starkest and most consistently felt. It was the Tories' pledge in 2010 to cut immigration to the low tens of thousands that secured them so many working-class votes and ultimately a chance to run government. Later, it was Boris Johnson's proposed 'Australian-style' points system which helped give them an 80-seat majority in 2019. It is hard to appreciate the popularity of the points policy. It remains the joint-most popular policy I have tested in 25 years (alongside making new arrivals pay for NHS care). Partly explained by reality TV shows they had seen about Australian border police, people thought it offered the perfect solution: a system to allow useful workers in, keeping out those that could not or would not work. When immigration rose dramatically after the 2019 election, working-class voters who backed the Tories for more than a decade felt sick with betrayal. It was this broken promise that led directly to the rise of Reform. Starmer's continued failure on immigration explains why Reform tops all the polling charts. Recent polling by Ipsos showed Reform is more trusted than either the Conservatives or Labour on immigration policy. All this takes us back to Farage's speech this week and his position as a prime minister in waiting. How likely is it that Reform will form a government? To answer this, we should first consider how 'sticky' their voters are likely to be. It is one thing to tell a pollster you will vote Reform – or vote for Reform in the local elections – but another thing to put a cross next to a Reform candidate in a general election. But Reform's provincial electoral base has lost all trust in the main parties. While Starmer might be able to bring immigration down significantly, and reduce the flow of small boats, it is unlikely that he will manage to do so on the scale required to soothe Reform voters. Hopes that economic growth will return or that the NHS will see a step-change in performance also seem unlikely. You must still doubt whether Reform can sustain their poll lead in the face of a massive establishment backlash. As I wrote in these pages recently, if public sector unions, the civil service, the legal profession and even the police all line up to suggest that life in Britain will grind to an unpleasant halt with Farage as prime minister, you must assume that many voters will not have the stomach for such a fight. That said, Reform are still heading to secure many dozens of MPs at the next election. At the heart of a much-needed perfectly-run campaign must be a manifesto which emphasises their strength on key issues of immigration and crime, and which reassures voters they are not about to mess everything else up (above all, the NHS). If you were creating a populist party from scratch, polls and focus groups would dictate the design of your manifesto. You would start with the absolute non-negotiables for the public and work from there. But Reform's manifesto cannot be purely determined by opinion research. Farage entirely defines Reform and he has a clear ideological history as a Right-wing Thatcherite. Reform cannot therefore just say whatever voters want to hear. As we saw this week, the nature of Reform's coalition makes policy design hard. Their immigration policies only need refinement and defensive lines, mainly to reassure voters that NHS and care workers will still be able to move to Britain. The same is true of their policies on crime and justice, which pledge a shift of policing towards serious offences and an expansion of prison capacity. Three things should inform their approach to the rest of their manifesto. Firstly, they should ramp up those micro-policies that they know the public care about deeply, but which tend to be written off by other parties as parochial. For example, Reform could pledge to make driving 'like it used to be'. Filling in potholes is already a Reform priority. They could also scrap most 20mph zones and reduce the number of cycle lanes and low-traffic neighbourhoods. Elsewhere, they could scrap demands for people to have multiple bins. They could force public-facing public bodies like HMRC or the DVLA to start taking phone calls again properly. They could elaborate on their pledges to cut government waste – which appear to be a crucial element of their financial plans – and force all public sector bodies to conduct and publish reviews into the management of their services. These sorts of small-time policies attract derision from commentators but they are exactly the sorts of things that voters bring up unprompted in focus groups. Critically, they would carry no ideological baggage and irritate neither Left- nor Right-leaning voters. They would also provide simple talking points for Reform candidates on the door step. Secondly, and the mess of their policy package this week confirms a need for this, Reform should study the Conservative Party manifesto of 2019 and unashamedly rip off a series of policies from this document – particularly on those areas where a huge amount of technical knowledge is required, which Reform cannot easily access having never been in Government. On education, the Tories said they would back Ofsted inspections, expand the free schools and academy programme and increase the number of 'alternative provision' institutions for those excluded from schools. On transport, the Tories said they would invest in railways in the Midlands and North of England, re-open lines that had been closed in the past, and expand contactless payments across the transport network. On the workforce, the Tories committed to training up hundreds of thousands more apprentices and creating a National Skills Fund to enable individuals and small businesses to undertake skills training. Reform should adapt and market these policies as their own. There is no point Reform re-inventing the wheel on a lot of areas, when the hard work has been done already. Thirdly, Reform should say they are going to trust the experts. The party is already committed to a Royal Commission to look at the future of social care. Reform should take the same approach to the wider NHS and commit to a serious review – led by clinicians – on the future of the NHS, while promising that it will always be free at the point of use and held in public hands. Voters will not care that there have been other recent reviews; Reform's review can make a virtue of being led by those that deliver the services on the ground. The NHS is the area where Reform are most vulnerable. In the past, Farage has said that Britain should move to an insurance-based system. Given the US has an insurance-based system, it is easy to see why opposition politicians suggest the NHS is not safe in Reform hands. If the NHS is Reform's greatest vulnerability, their greatest choice comes on the economy. Here, their best bet is to embrace the free market in its purest form. This means, for example, bolstering consumer rights against big businesses, encouraging the creation of new businesses by cutting taxes on small firms and their founders, and easing planning restrictions for businesses. This is serious free-market economics, but for ordinary voters. While the public have little sympathy for big businesses, even their working-class base loves small businesses and holds respect for entrepreneurs and the self-employed. No party has yet articulated an economic policy primarily through the prism of these sorts of risk-takers, preferring to talk about abstract macro-economics. Reform should do things differently. Whether Reform can form a government or not, nobody should be under any doubt that voters are in the mood to tear things up. Those people that suggest the British electorate somehow turned in a different direction to Right-moving voters in the US and Europe are not listening. The public did not vote for technocratic competence under Starmer; they voted to guarantee idiotic Tories got the boot. For the foreseeable future, rage will determine British politics. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Washington Post
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
New independent movement wants to deny both parties a House majority
LIVONIA, Mich. — During focus-group sessions in this bellwether state, two groups of swing voters were asked last month to give an instant assessment of the two political parties. The Democratic Party came under attack: 'old, slow … lost … a joke … rudderless.' The image of today's Republican Party wasn't much better, viewed largely through President Donald Trump: 'far right, no middle … a joke, too … united … delusional.' Behind the screen that blocked her from the participants, Lura Forcum nodded with approval. As president of the Independent Center, Forcum is leading a bid to rally voters who dislike both major parties around alternative candidates who will appeal to the vast middle. A former marketing executive, Forcum has joined up with several disaffected former Republican-leaning operatives to do intense research on voter attitudes. Their next step will be to recruit candidates willing to take long-shot bets at winning House seats and upending a political system that's been built around a two-party Congress since just after the Civil War. The sessions, conducted over 90 minutes each in mid-April, showed these voters would like more options. They overwhelmingly voted for either Trump or Kamala Harris, but not out of abiding respect toward either major party. 'You have two actors who've insulated themselves from competition, but what it's allowed them to do is stop responding to the market. So, of course, it's going to invite in a competitor,' Forcum said in a follow-up call Thursday. Her cohorts, Adam Brandon and Brett Loyd, are the top political strategists. Brandon served as president of FreedomWorks until last May, when he had to shutter the libertarian-aligned organization that lost relevance in the Trump era. Loyd, who once served on Trump's polling team, now runs a nonpartisan polling and data firm while overseeing the research and focus groups for the Independent Center. Their objective is both relatively small and, in terms of impact, potentially massive. Rather than trying to run a third-party presidential campaign that would require billions of dollars and untold resources to get ballot access in all 50 states, they hope to win up to a handful of House races with centrist candidates who will not accept support from either major party. In this era of such narrow margins, that might deny Republicans and Democrats the 218 votes needed for the majority and create a protracted negotiation for a coalition government. 'We're going to that new center. So I will say that people are scared of this being a spoiler. Yes, we're trying to wreck the system. We're trying to disrupt the entire duopoly,' Brandon said during Thursday's video call. For three straight elections, the House majority has not topped 222 seats. Currently, House Republicans hold just 220 seats. Picking off three to five seats might be enough to block either party from the minimum needed for the majority. Brandon envisions a House with a small bloc of independents who can negotiate and determine which party gets the majority, based on the independents' demands. 'We want a debt commission. We want to start studying this issue. We want to start backing this type of reform,' he said. The three understand the uphill nature of their task. Not since 1990, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) won his first congressional race, has a new candidate won a House race as an independent. And for more than 140 years, either Democrats or Republicans emerged from elections with a clear House majority. But Loyd noted that the House provides so many possible openings, unlike a presidential race or a massive Senate campaign. 'There's 435 seats in the House. We've got 435 chances,' he said. Their ripest targets would be the highly educated suburban districts that have swung back and forth over the past 15 years. But some solidly Republican or Democratic districts, with incumbents who haven't worked hard in an election in a long time, also offer opportunities. The most competitive House races in a midterm election draw roughly 300,000 voters, with fewer than 250,000 casting ballots in noncompetitive races with seemingly entrenched incumbents. Those latter races also see as little as $1 million in total spending. Their pitch is either incredibly naive or ahead of the times, in terms of campaign finance laws and technology. They only want their candidates to raise enough money to hire a few top aides. All other functions of the campaign will be handled through a super PAC (somehow no one else bought the rights to 'Independent PAC' until now) that will fund voter mobilization and advertising. And they want their candidates to emerge as late as possible in terms of filing deadlines to get on ballots, a type of political sneak attack for which the traditional parties are not preparing. The Independent Center doesn't have a single galvanizing issue. Ross Perot's Reform Party movement in the 1990s grew out of concerns about the national debt, while the Republican Party emerged in the 1850s with its antislavery agenda. They intend to rely heavily on AI to mine issue trends in districts to find the right issues to move independents. This agenda is more focused on a broken political system. With so much voter cynicism, Loyd imagines how one of his candidates could mock the other two major-party nominees in a general election debate. 'Wouldn't it be great if the candidate could win without raising millions and millions and billions of dollars from lobby groups and special interests? Wouldn't that be great?' Loyd proclaimed. Exit polls showed a surge in voters calling themselves independent, growing from 26 percent in 2020 to 34 percent in 2024. Ideologically, moderates are now the dominant force in politics: 42 percent of voters considered themselves moderate last year, compared with 35 percent identifying as conservative and 23 percent liberal. Recent conventional wisdom has focused on the concept that most independents regularly vote with one major party or the other, with less than 10 percent of all voters truly being up for grabs in a close campaign. Forcum doesn't buy that prospect. With a PhD in consumer psychology and years in academia, Forcum believes both political parties have ignored the growing bloc of independents while devoting most of their budgets to negative ads that appeal to their most faithful supporters. 'We're leaving out all these people in the middle who dropped out of politics because it is unpleasant, absurd and inhumane,' she said. 'And if we're offering them a path to political engagement that's more pleasant than that, I think that we have a huge opportunity. I don't think it's nearly as crazy as it otherwise would sound.' A year ago, Brandon spoke at a political conference aligned with traditional Reagan-Bush conservatism. He told the crowd that they had lost to the MAGA movement, that it had fully taken over the Grand Old Party. 'It was literally like I killed a cat in the room,' he said. 'I came off the stage and not one person wanted to talk to me.' Except Forcum, who walked up to him and found a kindred spirit. Loyd also had his own disillusionment with traditional politics. In 2016, he was flying high with Kellyanne Conway's polling company, correctly predicting a Trump surge that propelled him to an upset victory. Three years later, when the reelection team's polling leaked, showing Trump headed for defeat to Joe Biden, he got fired. 'You're catering to the fundraising crowd. And it's truly childish,' Loyd said of polling for traditional party candidates. Their target audience is younger voters, particularly in the millennial and Gen Z groups. They have grown up in a culture where they can choose anything to watch or listen to, not constrained by what the main TV and radio stations are offering at that moment. 'If you're under 50, you get it,' Brandon said, describing how his pitches to donors go. In Livonia, about 20 miles west of downtown Detroit, Loyd questioned two groups of 10 voters, only two over age 50. While nine voted for Trump and five voted for Harris, the others either did not vote or voted for a third-party option. Loyd asked them about next year's Senate race in Michigan. Only one said, right now, he would support the Republican. Two were undecided, and two said they would vote for the Democrat. Five said, if the right candidate appeared, they wanted to vote for an independent. Now this new group needs to find candidates and prove independents can win. 'We have got to get it right once or twice, and that's all it's going take,' Brandon said. 'Prove the point, and then it's going to be a groundswell.'
